systemic leadership

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systemic leadership
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VIKTOR KUNOVSKI, Consultant, United Kingdom

systemic leadership

...Luckily a new management style is also present and is slowly making its way and substituting the old schools of managing/governing.
This new managerial style substitutes fear with trust, command and control with support, is in tune with the whole system, the people who are part of it, and it also is in tune with nature and other living systems that surround it. It considers organizations for what they really are, a living organisms made of living people.
This style is a braking point, where management ends and leadership begins.
Cohesion and alignment between people and energies is vital to this leadership style. I will call it organic systemic leadership.
One person that certainly knows about this is James Surowiecki who in his book “The wisdom of crowds” says:
“Our collective intelligence is often excellent”
He continues:
“If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to make decisions affecting matters of general interest, that group’s decision will over time be intellectually superior to the individual, no matter how smart or well informed he is”.

The experience of many companies also shows that the results that they give when being governed by this organic systemic leadership are more sustainable and with better overall performances.
I have seen examples and proofs many times that
“The system is always wiser than the leader or the leadership team that leads it”.
Key attitude important to successful systemic leadership is that the system is governed by the wisdom of the system itself (collective intelligence) and the leaders of the new era will be the one that will possess the quality of wisdom to recognize that the “system is no doubt wiser than him/her”.
The new leaders will selflessly put themselves in service of the system, and feed this systemic wisdom back in the system itself and guide it. Further more he/she will need to tell the people in the system that what he/she is doing is simply responding to what they (people in the system) need and are motivated by.
In such a case, we do not have “a Leader” but rather a shared ownership and responsibility or a “systemic shared leadership”. This is how we’ll govern our organization, nation or the humanity.
In this way an effortless empowerment is happening. The leader is being lead, by the wisdom of the people that he leads. Kind of perpetumobile of effortless trust, support, nourishment and full spectrum functioning of the leader and the system.
Shared leadership or the “systemic leadership“ in my opinion is the most powerful leadership there is and is perhaps something we all need to include and put out there in global awareness. This is not only wise but is empowering as well, both for the leader and the lead.
It empowers the people who empower the leader that serves them by guiding them.
This is how a leadership sustainability will be accomplished in my opinion and perhaps general global sustainability on all levels.
And no, this is not an utopia, this is actually happening and it gets more present thankfully. The systemic leadership is in tune with the nature, with the universe itself, it is alive and it is also human and spiritual as well. ..

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